Introduction to Engineering Design

Course Description

The computer based curriculum for this course has been developed to change the way in which technical drawing courses are delivered. Conventional drawing courses using the computer simply took the traditional hand drawn, three view, drawing used for most of this century and showed how to enter and modify those three views on the computer, using drafting programs as AutoCAD. This concept then requires the users to imagine how the finished product would look in real life. This new curriculum starts from the concept of developing a computer-generated model of an object that is already in 3-D. Once the model is created, the object, whether large or small, can be observed from many different viewpoints, animated, textured, highlighted and dimensioned. The student will learn how to create, control and use this new and powerful environment. This type of computer generated 3-D model representation has become the modern industrial standard. The authors of this course believe that the visualization capability provided by modern computer hardware and software is an extremely powerful problem-solving tool that develops student skills that are useful in many of today's technical careers. This course will emphasize the development process of a product, however, the techniques and procedures learned here are not just limited to use in engineering fields but are equally applicable to many other design careers such as in architecture, computer graphics, software development, advertising or film animation.